5 Video Games That Are Straight Out of Fever Dreams

Video games can unlock entire universes where we can bandy about. Sometimes, those universes are just straight up weirder than anything we could possibly dream up. Here are five video games that are definitely the product of fever dreams.

Catherine

In Catherine, there are two distinct “halves” to the game — during the daytime, you juggle the affections of two very different women, trying to figure out what to text them so as not to… ahem… arouse suspicion. During the nighttime, though, hoo-boy, you grow ram horns, wear cartoony heart-covered boxers, and climb up a deadly wall of shifting blocks to get away from baby and butthole monsters — the literal manifestations of your daytime anxiety. If there’s anything games today are missing, it’s butthole monsters. Imagine how much better L.A. Noire would have been!

Takeshi’s Challenge

The fact that a game as weird as Takeshi’s Challenge could exist in the ’80s is a testament to how batsh*t crazy Takeshi Kitano could be. In it, you’re fired from your job, fight yakuza mobsters, play pachinko, sing karaoke, and hang-glide to a secret island. Oh, and there’s a restaurant that sells “grilled Mormons”, so, you know, it’s pretty much your basic 1986 fare.

Katamari Damacy

In Katamari Damacy, you play as a prince trying to rebuild the universe (that your alcoholic king of a father wiped out on a bender), and in doing so, you must roll every single object there is into a ball that gets bigger and bigger and bigger. This would sound like a nightmare right out of Catherine, but… well… you know what’s missing. (It’s butthole monsters. That’s what’s missing.)

Seaman

Aside from the bajillion jokes based on the name alone, there was a TON of weird (and DARK) stuff afoot in the Dreamcast’s Seaman. It was your job to care for a weirdly human-faced fish creature, who eventually evolved into a frog creature, by literally talking to it using a microphone. The titular Seaman, voiced in English by Leonard Nimoy, could recognize your speech and talk back to you, which confirms that the Dreamcast was the console of choice for Skynet. The T-1000 would be no match for a sassy amphibian.

Custer’s Revenge

Custer’s Revenge was weird in a much different way than your Catherines or your Seamen. Custer’s Revenge revolutionized “adult games”, and did so in INCREDIBLY racist and disturbing ways. The object of the game was to… er… yeah, not even going there. Just go play Seaman and forget this monstrosity (which boasted high-larious alternate titles like Westward Ho and The White Man Came) ever even existed. Not even butthole monsters could save this one.

(Okay, maybe butthole monsters could save this one.)

What kind of fever dreams do video games give you? Let me know on Twitter!